Legislators should cooperate with Wolf

Wolf was elected on a pledge to increase spending on public education and to tax Marcellus Shale drillers, so nobody need feign surprise at these components. His plan to simultaneously cut school taxes (and even eliminate them for some seniors) while raising the state income tax and sales tax and to begin taxing some exempt categories also makes sense.

The income tax increase of 21 percent sounds horrific, until you realize that since it is a low tax to begin with, this increase would barely be felt at upper-income levels. And a 0.6 percentage point increase in the sales tax? How terrible is that?

It's amusing to see that in 2013 Republicans floated a plan to replace school taxes with higher income and sales taxes, but since Wolf is a Democrat no doubt he will be savagely opposed. The similarity to the Affordable Care Act, which was based on a GOP think tank's model, springs to mind. Here too is legislation whose component parts, starting with the mandate (needed to keep the pool as large as possible), are all key to making it work.

But sensible as its basic ideas are, opposing them is axiomatic for the true-believer Republican. Sure, I think our state legislators should put their knives away, consider how important education is to a state's success, and work in tandem with Wolf. But that is far, far too much to expect.